Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. I’ve convinced the team you’d be perfect, come join us as the VP of Marketing.” Never mind The first idea for our new company was a software product that looked something like Hypertext.

North Carolina 131

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 131

socialmatchbox.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

These days sales, marketing and PR people seem to grow on trees. If you post up an ad to an online job board asking for someone to join your very high risk early stage startup company the odds of getting someone who decent are slim to none. The first part is the hardest part: hunting for a programmer.

Part-Time VPE 41

Part-Time VPE Sweat Equity DC Washington 41

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. They looked at their watches, gave our sales guy a quizzical look and left.

Technology 143

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 143

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 2, 2014

There’s an old joke in software development, “How much time does it take to design software?” If you’ve been involved with a number of software projects you already have an intuitive sense for this. CEOs are time-driven creatures. Not funny, “ha, ha” but pretty apropos.

Software 344

Software Part-Time VPE Engineer Leadership 344

firstround.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

Ian Langworth started his career as an O’Reilly author and software engineer at Google. Not too long ago, I was a software engineer preparing to start my very first company. I was their first full-time engineering hire and I helped build out the team and set the agenda for product development.

CTO Hire 52

CTO Hire Engineer Software Review Part-Time VPE 52